JoJo exposes regarding struggle with drinking and depression

Some fans may remember singer JoJo best for her 2004 jam, “Leave (Get Out),” but the song stress is back and every one grown up.

Armed with a catchy new single, and her first full-length album in 10 years — titled “Mad Love” — JoJo, currently 25, is set for an epic comeback.

After all, the last decade hasn’t been straightforward, to say the smallest amount. JoJo went through a drawn-out legal battle together with her previous, now-defunct record label, and conjointly struggled with depression, drinking, and pressure she felt to lose weight at such a young age. ET recently sat down with JoJo, who candidly talked about what she’s been through within the last ten years since she put out her last album, 2006’s “The High Road.”

“I’ve had several low points, honestly,” JoJo tells ET’s Katie Krause solely. “I thought, ‘How will I come back back from this, you know, an excessive amount of time has passed.’ I was depressed, I was drinking a ton as a result of I wanted to induce out of my mind. I’m being totally honest. … I simply wanted to feel good and acquire out of my mind which was obviously attempting to fill a hole that I had.”

JoJo 1st topped the charts when she was 13 years old, and he or she says she was subsequently pressured to lose weight in her teenage years — and typically took extreme measures. At one point, JoJo was eating solely five hundred calories a day and injecting herself with supplements within the hopes of shedding pounds fast.

“I simply felt like, as a feminine artist, our bodies were up for debate,” she explains. “I thought men might simply have their opinion and tell me what I was supposed to look like. Therefore, I was eighteen and i was told that if I did not look a sure way that they wouldn’t place out my music. Therefore, my music was already being dangled in front of me and that they already were saying that, you know, things weren’t gonna happen, so I was like, ‘Oh, if this can be gonna build my music come back out, then OK.'”

“I was on shots,” she reveals. “I was injecting myself with this issue from this dietician that makes it so you’re not hungry, and it tricks your body into thinking you’re pregnant, therefore then the food that it might offer the baby, it finishes up, like, expelling. … I wasn’t even done growing, necessarily, but as a result of I needed my career to maneuver forward and that i was thus scared, I did it.”

The experience undoubtedly had some lasting consequences.

“It messed with me psychologically as a result of I felt like, ‘How can I maintain this?’ once I got off of it,” she admits. “How could I enjoy food? And it simply created me feel like, ‘Am I not good enough of a singer? Am I not special enough? Am I not pretty?’ It made me question all that.”

JoJo says she was eventually in a position to beat her problems with the help of her fans, and conjointly by releasing her music free online. She’s currently signed to Atlantic Records.

“I had to sue twice. I spent all my time and money to induce to the opposite aspect of it,” JoJo comments. “However during that time, I was releasing mixtapes, I was maintaining my relationship with my fans — that is everything to me — and which extremely kept me somewhat sane.”

Her new single, “F–k Apologies” that includes Wiz Khalifa, is all regarding radiating empowerment and confidence.

“I don’t feel confident one thousand p.c of the time, however oftentimes I write the songs that I want to listen to, with the messages that I want to,” she says. “I feel like, notably as females, generally we tend to apologize for absorbing space … for taking the moves that we tend to need to make, whether we tend to understand that we have a tendency to’re being apologetic for it. Therefore, it extremely is just about knowing who you’re, digging who you’re, not making excuses to create other folks feel comfy.”

And with time definitely comes a lot of wisdom.

“My last album I was 15 [years old]– thus [currently at] 25, in fact I actually have a brand new perspective and a replacement appreciation for what it suggests that to be able to measure my dream,” she says.